I am playing around with a wifi lan here. My friend (who is asleep) has a wifi card just as I do and we have a router here that we both connect to. So I started ethereal and started sniffing.

Then I went to his computer and logged in at my own account here at LQ, trying to sniff my own password. Then I saw that the only packages I got was the one sent TO his card, I did not get anything with his ip as the source.

My guess is that there is a big difference between an access point and a card, so my card does not get what he is sending, just what he is getting. Is this right and is there anyway that I can sniff things coming FROM him?

The problem is your wireless card drivers. To my understanding, drivers supplied by wireless vendors dont support "monitor" mode, which is necessary to capture from wireless interfaces besides yours and the AP.

Try Kismet instead. Or you can get an Orinoco wireless card.

For some really excellent discussion about wireless networking, check out netstumbler.org.

Kismet will not allow packet sniffing as described by the original poster.

An ORiNOCO card, in and of itself will not allow monitor mode. A driver patch or release candidate drivers are required for that (and for using Kismet). More detail is available on the Kismet-wireless site.

Ethereal must be run in promiscuous mode to see things in both directions. MezzyMeat, make sure you select that option when running it.

Yeah, it worked when I manually put it into monitor mode before sniffing